Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

[J.Whitley]

Gents,

The question is pretty much as it is stated in the subject line: I'm wondering what the period Pennsylvania Appalachian accent might have sounded like. Would it bear any resemblance to the Western North Carolina accent, being as the region was settle by the same people?

[Curt Schmidt]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

Hallo!

An easy question, with hard to impossible answers.

The reason why is the evolution of American English with its regional and trans-regional accents SINCE the Civil War.

It is old and the hair styles and clothing dated, but on of the best studies ever done was the 1986ish "The Story of English" a PBS miniseries of some
9-10 hours with a companion book by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.
Some libtraries can obtain the tapes and book it on inter-library loan.

North Carolina is complicated as well, as you have the settlement patterns coming down south from eastern/central PA as well as from the coast moving west. Then mix it all up in the past 150 years.

Being born in western PA, I had such an accent which moving to northern Ohio (Ohio having three 'zones" stacked south to north due to the north being New Englandish, the South being Viginiaish, and the center being Pensylvanianish all complicated in the last 150 years by foreign immigrants, West Virginians andd Kentuckians coming north out of the coal fields for the auto industry, blacks coming out of Jim Crow South, etc.). The schools thought terrible and sent me to speech therapy to be able to speak "unaccented Mid Western".

:) :)


It is hard to write accents, tones, inflections, and speech patterns.. and is better to hear them. Suc as broom, root, and roof being brume, rute, and rufe versus brom, rut, ruff. Or Mary, merry, marry being Mairree, mairee, or mairee versus Mahrie, maurry, or mairrie.
Or tire and fire being tyer, fyer or tar and far.

;) :)

Try the "The Story of English." It deals with origins, beginings, evolution over time and place and why, and how post CW developments creatred 'Modern American English."

Curt

[David Fox]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

...or, with tongue not entirely in cheek, one could go with Feldwebel Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes".

[cprljohnivey]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

Did no one in the 19th century speak pig latin?

[cwpilgrim]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

Never mind.

[Nathan Dodds]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

Jim, I would suggest trying to find recordings of old people from the region you are interested in, recorded as long ago as possible. There are recordings of people that were alive during the war between the states. Most people change the way they speak a little over a lifetime (sometimes a lot). Add to that the fact that old people's voices change and things get more complicated as to the way they actually sounded... But it's the best you can really do. Something that is also helpful to speaking regionally is reading letters from the era--this helps you find out how people of a region and a social class phrased things. Miss-spelling may also provide clues to pronunciation. Once, again, that's about the best that can be done.

[minstrel_boy]

Re: Pennsylvania Appalachian accent

A while back, I was doing something similar to what your doing in trying to find a way to study a regional accent. My search focused more towards the north Alabama, east Tennessee area of the Blue Ridge, but the method I used was much like what Nathan was saying above. A few casual hours here and there listening to recordings (work commute) gives you a real feel for how the language should roll on, and a good lexicon was especially helpful to me in finding the way to pronounce the words. A good, broad introduction to many older parts of the country is Mark Wolfram's American English. Ususally pretty cheap on Amazon. There's a plethora of good books out there that give pretty straight forward phonetic breakdowns of words used in specific areas. Again, I'm not too familiar with the Pensylvania region's take on an appalachian accent, but one author in particular that I found helpful was Horace Kephart. Perhaps he did something similar for your area of interest.

Hope it helps,